If attacks like the tragic incident at Community High School, Ahoro-Esinle, persist, extend to other parts of Yorubaland and cause serious threats to education, the most prized commodity in the region, something is going to give…
By Farooq A. Kperogi
For more than a year, a conscientious, cosmopolitan retired senior military officer from the North has told me that his worst fear for Nigeria is the prospect of terrorists and bandits from the North extending their bloodstained tentacles into Yorubaland. He said it would provoke the sort of communal convulsion that would take on a regional and ethnic hue. He doubts Nigeria can survive it.
When news emerged of the abduction of students, teachers and other residents, including the chilling, tear-jerking slaughter of a teacher known as Michael Oyedokun in Oriire Local Government Area of Oyo State by armed terrorists, he reached out to me again yesterday to say his worst fears appeared to be materializing.
Before he reached out, my own thoughts had gone to what he had been telling me immediately after I read the news. I kept thinking: How will the people of the Southwest react to this heartrending incident?
What happened wasn’t a run-of-the-mill terrorist or bandit attack. It was a vile, criminal spectacle calculated to elicit raw emotions. It’s the kind of tragedy that every part of the North has endured in silence for years.
Several people forwarded to me the video of Oyedokun’s beheading. I couldn’t bring myself to watch it. I simply lack the mental and emotional strength to put myself through that kind of soul-depressing anguish. Yes, I confess to being a wimp when it comes to issues like that.
Even so, the story of Oyedokun’s decapitation, especially the last words he was reported to have uttered before he was beheaded, still haunts me. What sort of insensate beasts in human form snuff out life like that for fun?
My older friend’s fear is that, human beings being human beings, villainy from outsiders tends to be refracted through primordial lenses. And recriminatory responses to assaults against a group identity tend to target innocent people living among the victims, which provokes an endless cycle of unjustified retaliatory violence.
We have seen that in the tragic rupture of the centuries-old relational harmony between Hausa and Fulani people in northern Nigeria, about which the country seems oblivious, but which has spilled over to social media and is becoming the inspiration for so-called Hausa-Zalla [Hausa-only] associations.
Years of sustained rural and urban banditry in the Northwest, particularly in Zamfara, Kebbi and Sokoto, have caused many Hausa people to interpret what is happening to them in ethnic terms, which is perplexing to outsiders because the depth and breadth of the ethnic and cultural alchemy of the two groups is such that only self-conscious genealogy can tell them apart.
Ordinary Fulani people in rural Northwest Nigeria, who are not bandits and who are themselves victims of the horrors of bandits who happen to be Fulani, became targets of attacks by Hausa victims of persistent banditry who had been stumped by the steadily escalating virulence of attacks against them.
The tit-for-tat violent attacks between Hausa and Fulani people in the Northwest are off the radar of the institutional media because, as I pointed out in my December 29, 2018, column titled “Triple Jeopardy of the Unending Zamfara Mass Murders,” the media “lack ready-made, stereotypical mental representations with which to frame the conflict, so they either avoid reporting it altogether or minimize its horrors if they report it at all. The news media thrive on Manichean binaries, conflictual differences, and sensation. The Zamfara mass slaughters don’t lend themselves to that.”
Of course, under Buhari’s presidency, many northern Muslims had an incentive to conceal the recriminatory violence that went on between the Hausa and the Fulani in rural areas. They did not want to “embarrass” or undermine Buhari. That incentive is gone now.
If attacks like the tragic incident at Community High School, Ahoro-Esinle, persist, extend to other parts of Yorubaland and cause serious threats to education, the most prized commodity in the region, something is going to give, and it won’t be pretty for Nigeria. That was the core of my friend’s concern.
Human beings, in general, do not interpret identical acts through identical moral categories. They interpret them through group identity, threat perception and prior suspicion. Had an armed gang of Yoruba youths done exactly what the terrorists from the North did in Ahoro-Esinle, Yoruba people would likely say, “These are criminals,” “These are area boys,” “These are jobless youths,” or “The state has failed.” The crime would be individualized.
But because the perpetrators are northerners, it is more likely to be ethnicized or Islamized. The perpetrators cease to be merely criminals. They become representatives of a larger feared category.
As I said, this isn’t unique to Yoruba people. It’s a human trait. And it’s not hypocrisy. Were the situation to be reversed, that is, an armed gang that happened to be Yoruba abducting and slaughtering innocents in any part of the North, it would be interpreted in ethnic terms.
Scholars actually have a name for this. It’s called intergroup attribution bias. Some call it the ultimate attribution error. It means people tend to explain bad behavior by in-group members as situational, individual or exceptional, but explain bad behavior by out-group members as revealing something about the out-group’s character, culture or hidden agenda.
As I despair over the disquieting prospect of terrorist and bandit attacks by northerners devolving into a theater of mutually assured destruction, I recall President Tinubu’s self-professed raison d’être for being president in his memorable 2022 “Emi lo kan” speech in Abeokuta, and it gives me a little relief.
He said the irreducible minimum condition he gave Muhammadu Buhari for supporting his presidential aspiration in 2015 was that Buhari “must not joke with Yoruba interests” [“Mo sì sọ fún un pé kí ó má fi ọ̀rọ̀ Yorùbá ṣeré.”]
He also framed his presidency as the turn of the Yoruba. People don’t seem to realize that before he said “Emi lo kan” [It is my turn], he first said “Yoruba lo kan” [It is the turn of the Yoruba]. “This time, it is the turn of the Yoruba,” he said. “And among the Yoruba, it is my turn.”
Especially with the appointment of Major General Adeyinka Famadewa (rtd) as Special Adviser on Homeland Security, perhaps Tinubu will prove, as he told Buhari not to “joke with Yoruba interests,” that his presidency won’t countenance terroristic banditry in Yorubaland.
Should he do that, that would be one instance when I would celebrate ethnic particularism. It would be a positive use of ethnic solidarity for at least two reasons.
One, seeing the government aggressively and concertedly go after these bloodthirsty scum of the earth whose only reason for existing is to visit violence, death and misery on innocent people will reduce the temptation toward retaliatory violence against innocent northerners in the Southwest, which could propel reprisals against innocent southerners in the North.
We all know that in moments of inflamed national passions, most southerners can’t tell Hausa, Fulani, Nupe or Angas people apart. And northerners lump Yoruba, Igbo, Bini, Efik and other southerners into one undifferentiated group.
Second, if the terrorists from the North who have crossed over to the Southwest are vanquished, they won’t be alive to torment our people anywhere. And, of course, they won’t be alive to “repent,” be “de-radicalized” and “re-integrated” back into society, from where they wreak more havoc.
Yoruba lo kan shouldn’t be limited to exclusivist elite appointments. It should manifest in protecting the people from the existential threats posed by terrorists and bandits. That would, interestingly, benefit everyone in the country. I hope Yorubaland is where terrorism and banditry finally go to die.
•Opinions, positions or thoughts expressed here are personal and strictly of the writer/author and do not represent the views of The Daily Crucible.
